The late-Ming official Hsieh Chao-che traveled widely, spending most of his career in the provinces. His Wu-tsa-tsu (Five Miscellanies) is a priceless resource on Chinese thought and aesthetics in a period of profound political and social change. Oertling's complete translation of the sections on painting and calligraphy is exhaustively annotated and accompanied by a lengthy interpretive essay. Oertling examines the major critical trends of the age: the orthodox, with its emphasis on direct study of classic works, and the heterodox, which encouraged personal expression and...

First published in 1984, this index of Chinese paintings includes entries for approximately 3,500 traditional-style artists along with lists of their works, reproduced in some 264 monographs, books, journals, and catalogs published from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Formerly Professor of Oriental Art, University of Oregon, Ellen Johnston Laing is a research associate at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. She has written many articles on Chinese painting and popular culture, as well as The Winking Owl: Art in the People's Republic of China.

Lord Lao, first known as the philosopher Laozi, the purported author of the Daode jing, later became an immortal, a messiah, and high god of Daoism. Laozi, divinized during the Han dynasty and in early Daoist movements, reached his highest level of veneration under the Tang when the rulers honored him as a royal ancestor. In subsequent eras he remained prominent and is still a major deity in China today.
Livia Kohn's two-part study first traces the historical development of Lord Lao and the roles he played at different times for different believers. Part Two is based on one of Lord...

Yingjin Zhang guides the reader through the development of Chinese film criticism, pointing out that Western critics have studied a comparatively small number of films from a much larger body of work, often with a unidirectional Eurocentric bias. The result has been that the few have influenced the many, perpetuating a cycle of production of films from China that bow to the Western notion of "Chineseness." As a corrective, the author introduces readers to a much larger canon of film and proposes a multidirectional model of film studies, one that allows for a Western reading of Chinese film...

From its inception in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), the salt monopoly was a key component in the Chinese government's financial toolkit. Salt, with its highly localized and large-scale production, was an ideal target for bureaucratic management.
In the Song dynasty (960-1279), fiscal pressures on the government had intensified with increased centralization and bureaucratization. A bloated administration and an enormous standing army maintained against incursions by aggressive steppe neighbors placed tremendous strain on Song finances. Developing the salt monopoly seemed a...